Wegmans to open two stores in the Richmond area

Wegmans Food Markets Inc. plans to open two stores in the Richmond area, one in Chesterfield County and the other in western Henrico County.

“Over the years, we have had so many requests to open a Wegmans store in the Richmond area, so we are delighted to finally announce that we’re headed there,” Ralph Uttaro, Wegmans senior vice president of real estate, said in a statement.

The two Richmond-area stores will raise the number of Wegmans supermarkets in Virginia to nine.

One Wegmans store will anchor the planned 230,000-square-foot Stonehenge Village Shopping Center on Midlothian Turnpike in Chesterfield.

The site is less than a mile west of Chesterfield Towne Center and about 10 miles southwest of downtown Richmond.

The developer of the project is Marchetti Properties.

The second Richmond-area Wegmans will be in West Broad Marketplace, a new retail development in the Short Pump area of western Henrico County.

Wegmans will be an anchor tenant in the 435,000-square-foot shopping center on West Broad Street, about a half mile west of Short Pump Town Center and 13 miles from downtown Richmond.

The other anchor tenant will be Cabela’s, an outdoor sporting goods retailer.

West Broad Marketplace is being developed by Vienna-based NVRetail.

“We are excited to have Wegmans joining us at West Broad Marketplace” Jack Waghorn, NVRetail’s president, said in a statement. He described Wegmans, based near Rochester, N.Y., as the “premier food store in the country.”

Jo Natale, Wegmans' director of media relations, said it has received requests from Richmond-area residents to build a store there since the company opened its first Virginia store in Sterling in 2004.

"It was somethig we always had an interest in doing. It was question of finding the right site," she said.

The Richmond-area stores will be similar to other Wegmans supermarkets in Virginia. Each store will have 120,000 to 140,000 square feet of space and employ 550 to 600 full- and part-time workers.

Cconstruction timelines for the stores and their projected opening dates won't be known until all necessary approvals are in place, the company said.

Family-owned Wegmans has 83 stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts.

The company currently has six stores in Virginia: in Sterling, Fairfax, Fredericksburg, Gainesville, Leesburg and Woodbridge. A seventh store is scheduled to open next year in Albemarle County.

Founded in 1916, Wegmans has been named one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune magazine for 17 consecutive years.